Briscoe reinvents Martinsville approach with championship hopes hanging in balance

Chase Briscoe watched the final lap of last weekend's YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway just like everyone else. Kyle Larson exited Turn 2 with the lead. By the end of the backstretch, he had dropped to 11th. Some 20 seconds later, the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports driver miraculously crossed the start/finish line first. "It was the craziest range of emotions I feel like I've ever experienced," Briscoe told reporters in a Thursday teleconference. "It was definitely not an ideal situation with the 5 car winning, for sure." RELATED: Cup Series standings | Martinsville weekend schedule Briscoe entered the antepenultimate race of the 2026 season just 24 points behind Larson for the series lead. He earned 12 stage points with top-10 finishes in both segments and seemed destined to stay within at least a stone's throw of Larson after Sunday's scheduled 188-lapper. But running fourth in the top lane with six laps to go, Joey Logano crashed in front of him after a push from Carson Hocevar, leaving Briscoe with no room to escape. The No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota suffered heavy front-end damage that sidelined the team for the rest of the race, marking its third DNF of The Chase presented by Mobil 1. At that point, Briscoe's best scenario was hoping that Larson would plummet late. When Larson fell to 11th in NASCAR Overtime, Briscoe was 50 points back. By the time Larson secured the checkered flag for his first drafting-track victory in 59 starts, he was 79 markers – more than a race's worth of points – behind the postseason's most dominant driver. Briscoe's fellow championship-eligible teammates, Denny Hamlin and Christopher Bell, also dropped to 73 and 74 points back, respectively. "I'd be lying if I felt like all of us didn't have the wind let out of our sails a little bit," Briscoe said, recalling the mood from this week's JGR competition meeting. "Look, it's still very much possible, but you are going to have to do something pretty extraordinary. Even if you do go have two amazing days, you still have to have some help from the 5 car." Martinsville Speedway lies ahead on Sunday (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), where Larson can all but seal the deal on the 2026 Cup Series championship. If he scores 59 points in the Xfinity 500, no matter how the other title-eligible Chasers perform, Larson will be coronated with his second consecutive Bill France Cup as long as he starts next Sunday's finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. According to Racing Insights, Briscoe has a 1.3% chance of winning the championship. If he wins both races, his odds increase to 49.8% – but he would still need help from Larson. That task sounds Herculean. But don't forget that Briscoe already has back-to-back victories in The Chase, winning Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Charlotte Motor Speedway just a week after saying he'd need a 2011 Tony Stewart-esque run. Briscoe idolized Stewart growing up and drove four seasons at Stewart-Haas Racing before joining JGR after the organization's disbandment. In that legendary Chase run, Stewart won five times – including back-to-back races twice – to eke past Carl Edwards in a tiebreaker. Is that just more fuel to the fire? Briscoe certainly believes he isn't out of the title conversation. [caption id="attachment_530751" align="aligncenter" width="1300"]David Jensen | Getty Images[/caption] "I still very much feel like the championship is in reach," Briscoe explained. "Now, is it way harder? Yes, but when we were able to win two races back-to-back earlier in The Chase, I basically cut that deficit off in two races, and that's with the 5 car having two top-(six) runs. So yeah, I don't think it's out of the question. And even in those two races we won back-to-back, the second one, we didn't even have a clean-sweep day. "It's just – you have to win this weekend. That's the big thing. If you don't win this weekend, it obviously gets way harder to do that. I'm still going in with the approach that I can definitely win the championship ... if I was 20 points back going into this weekend, like, it's not an absolute must-win, where now it definitely is a must-win, so it just changes your approach a little bit." Among that approach change is how he'll tackle the 0.526-mile short track tucked into the hills of Southern Virginia. Briscoe believes Martinsville is one of his best tracks, referring to six straight top 10s during his SHR days, but hasn't found the same statistical success since pivoting to Toyota. In three JGR races, Brisoce's finished no better than ninth. He's working to conserve tire wear for increased speed on long runs – the opposite of his typical short-run driving style. Briscoe said he turned nearly 400 laps in the simulator on Wednesday, hoping that slowing means going faster. "It was hard in the sim. I was telling our group, I don't think it's going to be this difficult in real life to kind of find that feel and find that rhythm," he said. "I think the biggest thing is just trying to slow everything down, truthfully, and let the car do more of the work instead of trying to really hustle it and force it to do things it doesn't want to do, which I think that's why at Martinsville, I've been able to be fast when tires are new, and you're not slipping and sliding around all over the place. "This is the most different approach I've ever had for any of the race tracks we've gone to, so just trying to replicate things of guys that have been really successful there. It's definitely a different driving style than how I drive naturally." If that translates to a career-high fourth victory – and if Larson slips as he did at Phoenix just two weeks ago – it could be a completely different ballgame ... again. "The points can be flipped upside down at any moment," Briscoe said. "People talked about, oh, the 5 car could have a bad day at Phoenix. Nobody thought a bad day was (three points); they thought it was going to be 15 or 20 points. I even think about Martinsville for us last year; (Denny and I) blew engines ... so the same thing could happen to the 5. "You just never know in pro sports in general, whether it's racing, or football, or baseball or basketball. Anything can happen."